On December 14, a fintech venture dubbing itself Robinhood launched a consumer-banking product touting a no-fee, high-return, and yet somehow still profitable checking, savings, brokerage, and payment product. It didn’t take long to see that Robinhood would steal from the poor to feed the rich. Speculative investors have somehow bid the company up to a $5.6 billion valuation despite, as even a cursory analysis of public documentation shows, a flawed business model premised on a series of increasingly improbable assumptions about the transformative powers of financial technology and the malleability of U.S. financial regulation. Continue reading “Robinhood and the Sheriff of Nottingham: The Fintech Financial-Inclusion Illusion”→